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Effluvia Catch up on all your soccer and Euro 2000 news with the Times of London. I love Q-Bert. Pac-Man on the Atari 2600, however, sucked. Rich comedy? Um, no. Bygone
Days 75 YEARS AGO LITTLE ROCK - The Little Rock and Hot Springs highway was opened today. It required eight years to build. Eight years for an hour drive? Those guys must have been stupid. Boss Kenny 
"Talking about PERL reminds me of my first girlfriend. Her name was Pearl." Engineering porn. Blind guys. Menstruation. |
06/15/2000 Even More London More London, and I'll be gone for the next couple of
days - Donna, The Wife and I leave for Washington,
D.C. tomorrow to see the Cure. I'll take the iBook,
but since there's no practical way to get information
from one to the other I don't know if you'll ever
actually get an update, though. Maybe you will. Don't
hold your breath, okay? You'll hear from me, most
likely, on Monday. Fair Enough?
20 March 2000 So Saturday night was a total bust. Sonya felt worse and worse throughout the night - but we still went out to meet her friend Jayne so we could go to the transvestite bar. Not a drag queen bar, either. A bar where straight men who like to dress as women go to hang out. London is one cosmopolitan city, huh? You got to have a wide and varied populace to have a business that caters to a market that specialized. But it didn't happen. Jayne and her husband got in a fight and were taken off to jail at the tube stop where we were supposed to meet them. Sonya and I stood around at the Shadwell station for a good thirty minutes - and let me tell you, the area around Shadwell is scary. We hung out, wearing our black and our vinyl, and we got the wide-eyed looks from our fellow tube-riders. One guy kept a cautious eye on us the entire time, as if he were sure we were considering mugging him if we only got a chance. We hung out for about a half-hour, and while we saw broken glass from the fight earlier we did not see Jayne and her husband themselves. It was cold, we didn't know where we were and, to be honest, we both felt like shit. So we went home and went to bed. On a Saturday night. In London. Pathetic. And we pretty much wrote off Sunday, too. Kent and James had been out 'til four that morning so we slithered out of bed around noon and went to the pub for lunch. The Hedgehog and Pheasant, just an easy block away from our hotel, has become our de facto local, since we've had such lovely food and drink there and actually got free stuff there on St. Patrick's Day. We watched football and ate comfort food. Then some souvenier shopping around Victoria Station and it was back to the hotel for naps and the Sunday papers. Around dark Sonya and I went back out for dinner (Greek) and a Jack the Ripper tour. Approximately seven million people showed up for the tour - one of the guides had actually written a book on the subject and he is quite famous. We went with his understudy and enjoyed a far more moderate crowd. It was cool, seeing the neighborhood and all where the murder took place, but it's not as if I learned anything new. Hell, I've read the book the guy wrote. And the place where Mary Kelly was hacked to bits isn't even there anymore. But we stood in Mitre Square, and we went down this little alley called Artillery Row. Igot all shivery and thought, "oh yeah, Jack was here once upon a time." It was dark and shuttered and quiet and slickly cobblestoned and oh-so-creepy. I liked it. Today has been the trip to Stonehenge, and it went particularly well. We walked right on to the 10:35 train out of Waterloo to Salisbury as it was pulling out of the station. We sat in reserved seats, but the people who had reserved them never showed up. It was still kind of nervous seating, though. The train was fun - a quintessentially English way to travel. They sell beer on the trains; in Memphis, you bring your own beer on the public transportation. And while it may be a cliche, the English countryside is breathtakingly beautiful. Even though it's tilled and fenced it is wilder and, somehow, older than anything comparable in the United States. In Salisbury we got on the bus, sitting at the back with a couple of English backpackers and a muttering, twitching lunatic. "I hope he doesn't have a bomb," Kent said. He certainly seemed like the Mad Bomber-type. As for Stonehenge itself - 5,000 years, man. That place was special to people before the Roman Empire had even been conceived of. It's a ruin, sure, but a glorious, magical ruin. And the barrows spotting the surrounding hilltops are even older. I bet when they built it they (whoever they were) didn't think it would be a tourist attraction a few millenia hence. Or maybe it already was upon completion. Who knows? Hell, when the Romans finally came to England I bet they scratched their heads and wondered what it was for, too - just like I did today. On the ride back to Salisbury we sat on the front row of the top level of the bus. It was kind of like a rollercoaster and kind of nightmarish. A great way to see where you're going, too. And it really drives that wrong-side-of-the-road thing home to you. You need to do it. And now we're on the train back to London. Neat! |
